Talking about others: Emotionality and the dissemination of social information

There is evidence that we may be more likely to share stories about other people to the extent that they arouse emotion. If so, this emotional social talk may have important social consequences, providing the basis for many of our social beliefs and mobilising people to engage or disengage with the targets of the talk. Across three studies, we tested the situated communicability of emotional social information by examining if the ability of emotionality to increase communicability would depend on the emotion that was aroused and the identity of the audience. Study 1 showed that participants were more willing to share social anecdotes that aroused interest, surprise, disgust and happiness with an unspecified audience. Study 2 provided a behavioural replication of these findings. Study 3 showed that the communicability of emotional social talk did vary with audience identity (friend or stranger). Together, these findings suggest that emotional social events (particularly those that arouse disgust and happiness) are likely to become part of a society's social beliefs, with important consequences for the structure of social relationships. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Suppose Freud had chosen Orestes instead

Abstract :  The paper argues that the story of Oedipus, however understood, conveys psychic truth of no greater or more central importance to human development than do the stories of many other myths. A distinction is made between sophisticated theories developed out of Freud's original concept of the Oedipus complex, and the adherence by some clinicians to his original sexual theory. The meaning of Sophocles' play Oedipus the King is found to lie in the clash between Oedipus' omnipotent narcissism ( hubris) and the power of the unconscious psyche, rather than in cross-generational sex. Emphasis is placed on the clinical usefulness of understanding all myths symbolically. The Oresteia by Aeschylus is offered as a story about pre-Oedipal (in the Freudian sense) psychic states. This trilogy shows symbolically the developing of an ego, the establishment of moral judgement and the integration of our shadow (the Furies). It also shows the parallel development of structures of law in society to replace instinctive blood feuds. It is suggested that had Freud chosen Orestes instead of Oedipus, the course of both psychoanalysis and of Western society would have had a different emphasis.     

A semantics-based approach to the "no negative evidence" problem

Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., * Don't giggle me ) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax-semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling cannot normally be used causatively). The present study tested a new account based on a unitary learning mechanism that combines both of these processes. Seventy-two participants (ages 5–6, 9–10, and adults) rated overgeneralization errors with higher (* The funny man's joke giggled Bart ) and lower (* The funny man giggled Bart ) degrees of direct external causation. The errors with more-direct causation were rated as less unacceptable than those with less-direct causation. This finding is consistent with the new account, under which children acquire—in an incremental and probabilistic fashion—the meaning of particular constructions (e.g., transitive causative = direct external causation) and particular verbs, rejecting generalizations where the incompatibility between the two is too great.     

Navigating joint projects with dialogue

Dialogue has its origins in joint activities, which it serves to coordinate. Joint activities, in turn, usually emerge in hierarchically nested projects and subprojects. We propose that participants use dialogue to coordinate two kinds of transitions in these joint projects: vertical transitions, or entering and exiting joint projects; and horizontal transitions, or continuing within joint projects. The participants help signal these transitions with project markers, words such as uh‐huh, m‐hm, yeah, okay, or all right. These words have been studied mainly as signals of listener feedback (back‐channel signals) or turn‐taking devices (acknowledgment tokens). We present evidence from several types of well‐defined tasks that they are also part of a system of contrasts specialized for navigating joint projects. Uh‐huh, m‐hm and yeah are used for horizontal transitions, and okay and all right for vertical transitions.     

Social skills and the stress-protective role of social support

Cross-sectional analyses of data collected from a large sample of incoming college freshmen were used to determine whether the perceived availability of social support protects persons from stress-induced depressive affect; whether social competence, social anxiety, and self-disclosure are responsible for the stress-protective effect of perceived social support; and whether these social skill measures discriminate among persons for whom support will help, hinder, or be ineffective in the face of stress. Prospective analyses based on the original testing (beginning of school year) and 11- and 22-week follow-ups of a randomly selected subsample were used to determine how the same social skill factors influence the development and maintenance of support perceptions and of friendships. Evidence is provided for a stress-buffering role of the perceived availability of social support. The stress-buffering effect is unaffected by controls for the possible stress-protective influences of social anxiety, social competence, and self-disclosure. Although these social skill factors do not discriminate among persons for whom support will help, hinder, or be ineffective, they are prospectively predictive of the development of both social support and friendship formation. These prospective relations between social skills and the development of perceived availability of social support are only partly mediated by number of friends.